iPhone app roundup: Quickoffice, Otto Matic, Evernote 2
Filed under: iPhone, App Store
In the hustle and madness of yesterday’s wayback machine activity, there were a couple of App Store introductions (and a notable upgrade) that might have slipped through…
First up: The long-awaited version of Quickoffice for iPhone that allows editing of Word and Excel files hit the store today and was demoed at CTIA. While QO has had a ‘mobile files’ tool on the iPhone for a while now, this is the first build of the venerable portable office suite (which has been a favorite on Palm handhelds for years) that supports editing in both formats. Quickoffice for iPhone can do font formatting and cu
t, copy and paste within Word documents — presumably to be tied in with system-wide C/P in the OS 3.0 world-to-come. Both the Excel and Word tools support landscape mode for extra editing area.
Files on the iPhone can be transferred off the device using WiFi to a local Mac, or straight to a MobileMe account. Quickoffice for iPhone is shipping now for an “introductory price” of $19.99, but if you just want the Excel spreadsheet editor (formerly MobileFiles Pro) you can have it for $12.99; the Word document editor is also $12.99. Quickoffice Files (previously known as MobileFiles 2.0) is $3.99 and offers similar file transfer capability to Readdle and other file managers. We’re getting a review copy for a more thorough walkthrough later this week. It’s worth n
oting that a Microsoft exec hinted at a version of Office itself for the iPhone that may be coming sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Second… who doesn’t love a good robot game? For $4.99, you can now dive into Pangea’s classic Otto Matic series with the company’s new title for iPhone, Otto Matic: Alien Invasion. The B-movie style game pits Otto against the attacking Brain Aliens from Planet X; his job is to save as many humans as possible. Otto Matic: Alien Invasion features 10 levels and 25 different enemies, multiple weapons and activities, and quite a bit of fun.
Lastly, the TUAW top pick Evernote has been updated with a nifty landscape mode, thumbnail viewing, improved performance, favorites sorting, and an embedded web browser to reduce the tap a link –> Safari –> back to home screen –> scroll around –> relaunch Evernote loop-the-loop annoyances. Evernote 2.0 for iPhone remains a free download, and the basic Evernote service is also free; a year of pro-level service costs $45.
TUAWiPhone app roundup: Quickoffice, Otto Matic, Evernote 2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Game Developers Hit Paydirt With iPhone Apps
Gaming on a mobile phone is a relatively new phenomenon when compared to the decades that games like Pacman and Tetris have been around. However, the mobile gaming industry is exploding, and developers who have spent years creating games for the Mac are now jumping ship to create them for the iPhone instead.
Brian Greenstone, creator of the popular iPhone game Enigmo, says his company, Pangea Software, has sold over 800,000 copies in the last six months and netted $1.5 million in the process. Though the company at one time only created games for the Mac, the success of Enigmo has persuaded them to focus exclusively on developing games for the iPhone.
Greenstone says the company didn’t originally plan to go that route. In an interview with The Guardian online, he said, “The iPhone SDK came out, and we were just going to do some apps for fun. The next thing you know, the apps were making the Mac stuff look like a joke. The Mac stuff is like lunch money compared to what the iPhone does so there’s basically no point in going…back to the Mac.” He also says the iPhone is a much more entertaining platform to develop for and makes “50 times more” than similar games for the Mac.
Is this a sign of things to come? Not necessarily. As mocoNews.net’s Dianne See Morrison points out, random luck had a lot to do with Enigmo’s success. “For a start, [Greenstone] concedes that Pangea, as a long standing maker of Mac games, ‘got a lot of love from Apple,’ including being highlighted in the App Store.” Of course, getting a spot in the App Store’s Top 100 didn’t hurt either.
Randomness and good luck aside, it’s entirely possible that Mac game development will slow as the iPhone continues its march toward ubiquity. As evidenced by the wide array of productivity apps that we cover here, the iPhone is gaining traction as a plausible stand-in for a laptop. Add to that the fact that many people haul around a Nintentdo DS or PSP around for gaming-on-the-go, and it’s easy to see that there’s a niche ready to be filled by mobile gaming apps. I’m not ready to sound the death knell on games developed especially for the Mac, but I definitely expect it to take a downturn over the next couple of years.
